Sad Jennifer Aniston

Listen.

That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

The sound of captivating electric performance,

dynamic drive, and the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV, this is electric performance redefined.

The fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

This podcast contains explicit language.

In 2002, Mara Reinstein, a young journalist who was working at Teen People, walked by a newsstand and noticed a magazine she hadn't paid much attention to before.

Courtney Cox and Jennifer Anniston, mind you, this was still the height of friends.

And it was them on the cover, and the headline was, Will They Ever Have Babies?

It was a May 27th, 2002 issue of Us Weekly.

Us Weekly had recently made itself over from a monthly magazine into a weekly one, a magazine that was devoted to celebrities, but that didn't adore them.

Us was funny and trashy and impertinent.

It had the point of view of your curious, shameless, celebrity-obsessed friend.

And I remember walking by that cover and just thinking it was so intrusive and it's none of our business.

I was so high,

I will never work at a place like that.

And then I wound up working at Us.

Mara was a senior writer and then deputy editor at US for 15 years.

She's still the magazine's movie critic.

And she was there as it became a genuine cultural and publishing phenomenon.

First day I started at US was July 30th of 2002.

That September, so not even two months, was the season premiere of Saturday Night Live hosted by Matt Damon.

In Matt Damon's monologue, he referenced an Us Weekly story.

It was right there on the cover of Us Weekly.

The breakup of Justin Timberlake and Brittany Spears and their subsequent angry dance-off.

And the second that Matt Damon said Us Weekly's name on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, I was like, oh my God, like people are reading something that's in this office.

And we all of a sudden we all just felt important and what we were doing sort of made a difference in the celebrity world.

And then I would tell people that I worked at Us Weekly and it was like, oh my God, oh my God, my favorite magazine, my favorite, it was a guilty pleasure, except that no one really felt guilty about reading it.

Because if Matt Damon could reference it, how guilty was it?

Since 2002, so much about the magazine industry and the logistics of celebrity has changed.

Us took off before Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and the Kardashians.

It took off before magazine sales cratered.

The big couples from that time now sound like barely comprehensible early auths word salad.

Jared Leto and Cameron Diaz, Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, Britney Spears and that guy she married for 55 hours.

But there's one thing that stayed the same.

That Will They Ever Have Babies cover, a form of that cover has stood the test of time.

The whole notion of when is Jennifer Aniston going to get pregnant, that thread has continued since 2002, at least.

Mara's not exaggerating.

A couple of months ago, I was at the dentist's office and I saw a copy of the tabloid In Touch.

On the cover, there was a picture of Jennifer Anniston and her ex-husband, Brad Pitt.

The headline said, Brad and Jen, wedding and a baby.

Looking at it, I had only one thought.

How is this still a thing?

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm I'm Willa Paskin.

Every month we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

Jennifer Anniston's story had it all.

Heartbreak, secrecy, sex, betrayal.

But what it also had was a new kind of tabloid.

Us Weekly and its copycats.

Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Anniston for Angelina Jolie would have been a huge Hollywood scandal no matter when it happened, but it became an even bigger one because it was turbocharged by a new kind of media outlet.

The tabloids transformed Aniston into a literal covergirl for our angst, anxiety, concern, and disdain about and for single and childless women.

And almost 15 years later, at the age of 49, Aniston is still that covergirl.

In 2018, in addition to the one I saw at the dentist, In Touch ran an issue with a cover line, Brad Stuns Jen, Marry Me Again, and another about their Italian honeymoon.

Okay had a cover that said, Yes, I'm pregnant with Brad's baby.

And Star published an issue in November 2018, the week I'm writing this, that said, Brad and Jen, meet our baby.

What is going on?

How is it still going on?

Why is it still going on?

So today, I'm decodering an honest to God mystery.

Is Jennifer Anniston having Brad Pitt's baby?

So, full disclosure, in 2004, when I was just out of college and trying to figure out how to get a job at a magazine, I interned at Us Weekly.

I was really excited about it because I too found the magazine to be a delicious, guilty pleasure.

The office was in Midtown Manhattan, near Radio City Music Hall, and the floors were constantly lined with printouts of paparazzi photos and red carpet looks.

I mostly transcribed extremely long interviews with whoever had gotten kicked off the latest episode of The Bachelor, but I watched as everyone in the office, an office that was largely female, worked extremely hard to put out a magazine every week.

Annison was one of the biggest stars that Us covered.

She had first become famous in 1994, playing Rachel Green, the occasionally dissy but lovable everygirl on NBC's monster hit sitcom Friends.

Her excellent comedic timing, extremely popular haircut, and her character's on-again, off-again romance with the nerdy paleontologist Ross Geller made Aniston the show's breakout star.

Rach, maybe your resolution should be to gossip less.

I don't gossip.

Maybe sometimes I find out things or I hear something and I pass that information on, you know, kind of like a public service.

It doesn't mean I'm a gossip.

I mean, would you call Ted Koppel a gossip?

Friends, which is now streaming on Netflix, is still tremendously, even surprisingly popular.

But Anison would probably only be as famous as her friends' co-stars if, in 1998, she hadn't started dating Brad Pitt.

And right away, it was like, wait, what?

That's Lori Majuski, one of several women who worked at tabloids that you'll be hearing from in this episode.

Today, Lori's a serious XM radio host, but before that, she was a longtime magazine journalist, and she was an editor at Us Weekly from 2002 to 2005.

There was this sense that Jennifer Aniston was a friend.

She was like all of us.

Yes, she was prettier than all of us.

She was more famous than all of us.

Her hair was better than all of ours.

But she was one of us.

And right away, I knew in that moment.

that this wasn't this was like going to be like the soap opera for our times in 2000 they got married.

Photographs from their wedding ran on the cover of People.

In order to understand Jennifer Anniston's tabloid persona, you need to understand where a tabloid like Us Weekly was coming from.

And where it was coming from was People Magazine.

People was founded in 1974, a new kind of magazine devoted to personality journalism, to sharing with readers what relevant public figures, celebrities, politicians, athletes, special interest subjects, were really like, as opposed to focusing on news stories.

People was a Time Inc.

magazine and it worked hard to maintain the company's reputation for veracity.

When it ran a story, it usually had its subject cooperation.

They sat for an interview, they posed for a photo.

People was a huge success, selling nearly a million copies in its very first issue.

But by the late 90s, the kind of celebrity coverage it was offering, respectful, authorized, access-oriented, was no longer new.

Jan Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone and the owner of Us magazine, saw an opening in the market.

He wanted to turn Us, a monthly that had existed since 1977 and was originally created as a People Magazine copycat, into a weekly.

It would compete directly with people by channeling the spirit of European celebrity weeklies such as Hello.

This new magazine would focus on newsstand sales, which depend on catchy, salacious covers and that make way more money for magazines than subscribers do because they pay such a deeply discounted rate.

So, in March 2000, the year Pitt and Anniston got married, Us Magazine became Us Weekly, but it didn't really find itself until early 2002 when Leonard hired the editor Bonnie Fuller, who had already had success at magazines like Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire.

I mean, people had, at that time, it had a very almost AP style tone.

It felt very removed.

And I liked that we were giving a magazine that was more personal, like it had a sense of humor.

It was sort of like a little bit having fun with the celebrity culture.

Fuller's Us was mostly photographs, lightly dappled with text.

You didn't read it so much as look at it.

It was printed on glossy paper that made it appear classier, less cheap than the supermarket tabloids at the time, and more like an upscale real magazine.

Its hyperbolic covers often promised gossip the corresponding article didn't deliver.

Us's most well-known feature was Stars Stars Are Just Like Us, in which famous people were photographed doing extremely regular things.

Going to Starbucks, staring off into space, feeding the meter.

Yeah, celebrities go and put gas in their car too.

And Ben Affleck goes and does the Starbucks run every day.

When I'm looking at these people, I think,

boy, stars are just like us.

And we thought, yeah, that'd be a good name for it.

That's what we're going to call it.

And it was good to see that they were relatable.

But it's funny because I feel like there is like the nice reading of it, and that's part of it.

Like, they're like, you know, we have something in common.

But there is, like, what's funny about it is it's also like

insulting the stars because they're just like, like, there is a little sharpness there.

I never thought of it as being an insult to them.

Really?

Like, it's like, we're doing pictures of them like pumping their gas and like Uggs looking terrible.

I mean, they're not European celebrities.

They look like.

I always thought they looked cool.

I I don't know.

I never thought it was an insult.

I thought it was cool that they were just like us.

However, you read Stars Are Just Like Us, as elevating regular people, demoting famous ones, leveling the playing field, it was the perfect example of Us Weekly's originality, of the magazine's intuitive understanding of its readers' deliciously ambivalent relationship to celebrity, to the way that you can love some celebrities and hate others, and want to see both of them on the red carpet and with Bedhead.

This insight made us unstoppable.

Between 2000 and 2009, its circulation increased from 800,000 to 1.9 million.

It was regularly selling a million copies a week on newsstands.

All this success spawned competitors.

In 2002, the publisher Bauer launched In Touch and then in 2004, Life and Style.

In 2003, Fuller left us to relaunch the supermarket tabloid Star as a celebrity glossy.

In 2005, a version of the British tabloid OK arrived in America.

In a very short period of time then, the United States went from having no magazines quite like Us Weekly to having a lot of magazines that were a lot like Us Weekly.

A lot of magazines that were full of, well, what exactly?

True stories or kind of sort of maybe true stories.

And people

always give tabloid, I didn't even want to use the word tabloid, celebrity jobs a hard time, us weekly people, because they always say, it's not, the story is not true.

It's not true.

It's not true.

I never felt that a story that we ran wasn't true.

We never went, I mean, sometimes they turned out not to be true, but we always went in sourcing everything, researching everything to the best of our abilities.

That's Mara Reinstein again.

When I interned at us, the thing that surprised me most was that it had a fact-checking department.

I, perhaps like many skeptical readers, sort of expected it to be a factual free-for-all, but that wasn't the case.

The fact-checking at us, in my memory, had some specific rules.

If they were relying on someone else's reporting, reporting they weren't sure about, but that supported their story, they would use words like allegedly or reportedly.

But if they ran a story that straight up said that something had happened, that meant that the magazine had multiple sources telling them that it had.

It's not that everything published was true, but there was usually at least a kernel of truth, if not way more than a kernel, to whatever they ran.

You generally don't run a story until you have at least three sources telling you the same story.

And that's true.

And people are shocked about it when I tell them that.

I'm like, no, we have three legitimate sources telling us things.

That's Joe Piazza.

She was a longtime celebrity journalist who now writes novels and nonfiction books, including Celebrity Inc, How Celebrities Make Money.

In the early 2010s, she was in charge of a tabloid newsroom.

Your tips are coming in generally from a celebrity's publicist or team.

themselves, I mean, or a disgruntled former assistant.

God damn, just anyone that you've ever pissed off, the barista at the coffee shop, will call and tattle on you.

The kernels in the story are true.

The cover lines are always cookbaity.

And you always shape those to be whatever you think is going to like grab the reader, like psychologically, that's going to get the reader to click or to buy.

I want you to talk me through that like as granularly as possible.

You're choosing how to shape a story.

And you, you always, I think, looking back on it in hindsight, you always knew how those stories were going to turn out before.

And it's, and that's the part of it that's shoddy journalism.

There's nothing shoddy about the reporting on those stories.

What's shoddy is that you are crafting the narrative to be exactly what you want that narrative to be.

Okay.

So maybe I'm supposed to be horrified about this, but I'm not.

Instead, I find it clarifying about the ways at the time the tabloids were finessing the truth.

Because tabloids do that, right?

That's what makes them tabloids, what sets them apart from other, more respectable magazines.

A degree of comfort with running something that's maybe not true.

And what I take from what Joe said is basically that weekly tabloids are just like daytime soap operas.

Every so often on a soap opera, a big climactic story-changing event occurs.

Someone falls in love or someone cheats or someone comes back from the dead.

But the hard work of making a soap opera compelling is all of the momentum you have to keep up when nothing much is happening.

And this is the problem facing tabloids too.

When a big celebrity event occurs, like Anniston and Pitt getting married, they can just report on that.

But in the weeks and months that follow, when there's not that much news, they still have to make readers feel like they're following a propulsive story and not just reading a random assortment of meaningless celebrity tidbits.

So they craft the truth into a great headline.

So, just to recap, by the mid-2000s, you have a powerful new class of magazine, as well as a brand new kind of online gossip site, sites like Perez-Hilton and D-Listed, that are plucky and brash and have a huge amount of space to fill.

It's not a coincidence that this is when reality stars became such tabloid mainstays.

And these magazines have a business model, getting readers to buy the magazines on newsstands or to click on a story that puts a huge premium on headlines, headlines that will inspire strong emotions in prospective readers.

And then you also have Jennifer Anniston, a beloved, relatable celebrity and one-half of Hollywood's preeminent golden couple, who is already a tabloid fixture that millions of Americans feel very strongly about.

And it was at this point that the Jennifer Aniston soap opera got really melodramatic.

Only murders in the Bill Dates and five.

The hit Hulu original is back.

He was talking with this mobster.

Was he killed in a hit?

We need to go face to face with the mob.

Get ready for a season.

You can't refuse.

You're gonna save the day, like you always do, by being smart, sharp, and almost always find mistakes.

The Hulu original series, Only Murders in the Building, premieres September 9th, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers.

Terms apply.

New episodes Tuesdays.

In very early January 2005, Jennifer Annison and Brad Pitt went on vacation in the Caribbean.

By this time, rumors had been circulating that the Pitt-Addison marriage was on the rocks, in part because of Brad Pitt's connection to Angelina Jolie, his co-star in the just-filmed movie Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith.

Here's Lori Majuski again, who is the executive editor, the number two at Us Weekly at this time.

We had a team that was going to go to the Caribbean and stay at the same resort as them.

We got a call saying that

Jen Anniston and Brad Pitt were there and that they had gotten pictures of Jen and Brad taking a walk.

And you could see the sadness in her face.

Now, we did not know at this exact moment that this was them breaking up.

But honestly,

that's what it turned out to be.

A few days later, on a Friday evening, Pitt and Annison announced their separation.

Us ran the photos on the cover, and Mara Reinstein wrote the story that accompanied them.

I swear to God, if you're a celebrity journalist, you know where you were when you heard that news.

I hate to compare it to like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, but like in the celebrity journalism world, it is like

my mom was in town and I was like getting dinner with her at a Midtown hotel.

And Mike Steele, who was the deputy editor, called me back when we still had flip phones.

And he's like, they just announced their separation.

Come to the office tomorrow.

It was Saturday.

So, and we crashed the issue.

Maura would also crash in a period of 10 days an entire book about the pair called Brad and Jen, The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Golden Couple.

But it was outdated fairly quickly because just a few months later, us outmaneuvered people to secure the rights to run photographs of Pitt and Angelina Jolie on a beach in Kenya with her son Maddox.

If you are paying any attention at all to celebrities at this time, you probably know what these grainy photographs look like.

And even though nothing untoward is happening in them, it's just the three of them on the beach, with Pitt handing Jolie's young son some sand toys.

The photos seemed to confirm that all of the rumors about Pitt and Jolie were true.

It was just beyond, beyond, like anything a fiction writer would have written.

That's Monty Fuller again, who was overseeing Star at the time.

Did it sell a ton of magazines?

Oh, God, yes.

Yeah, of course.

I mean, they literally were America's golden couple.

And she was America's sweetheart.

And then, and

Angelina, of course, most people's view of her her at that time was, you know, she was the one that wore the blood vials around her neck.

Like, she couldn't be more opposite of their perception of Jen.

Truth is stranger than any fiction you could make up.

But even though the Anniston-Pitt-Jolie triangle was real, and even though the tabloids were accurately reporting the scandal's major milestones, they were also already crafting the narrative.

In the immediate aftermath of the separation, two storylines emerged running alongside each other.

The first was that Anniston was a sympathetic victim whose man had been stolen by a femme fatale.

But in the second, Anniston was a career-obsessed woman who didn't want children, so Pitt had left her for someone who did.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I do want to note that it's very easy to imagine that one of these stories came from the Anniston camp and that the other came from the Pitt Joe Lee camp.

But the careerist Jen's story was sidelined by a September 2005 profile of her, written by the veteran journalist and author Leslie Bennett, who had profiled Aniston before.

She just was kind of hiding out, staying in this rental house in Malibu, as this getaway.

And she'd given me the address, so I go there and I ring the doorbell, and she opens the door and she bursts into tears and throws her arms around me.

This scene opens the piece.

In the story, which also includes Annison's famous remark that Pitt must be, quote, missing a sensitivity chip, unquote, Anniston and Bennett directly address the then-dominant tabloid narrative.

Here's an excerpt.

For the 36-year-old Aniston, who had expected to spend the past year being pregnant, the pain of watching this spectacle unfold was compounded by vicious rumors about herself.

As misogynist as they were false, sensationalistic stories claimed the real reason the marriage ended was that Anison refused to have Pitt's baby because she was so ambitious, she cared only about her career.

Even now, that sexist slur makes her face darken.

A man divorcing would never be accused of choosing children over career, she says.

That really pissed me off.

I've never in my life said I didn't want to have children.

I did, and I do, and I will.

There's an amazing man that's wandering the streets right now who's the father of my children.

In five years, I would hope to be married and have a kid.

This issue of Vanity Fair, by the way, is the best-selling issue of Vanity Fair of all time.

This piece was a real turning point in the trajectory of Anniston's tabloid persona because it inadvertently birthed the only character Aniston has ever played who is as famous as Rachel Greene, Sad Jen.

Sad Jen is a version of Jennifer Aniston, who, despite being extremely rich, successful, and beautiful, is perpetually lovelorn and depressed, a forever victim who cannot keep a man or have a baby.

She's a perfect tabloid figure because readers could relate to her, who hasn't had a heartbreak, and wish for her happiness, even as her problems made them feel better about their own.

Here's Mara Reinstein again.

What happened in the case of Aniston?

We had a reporter who was friends with someone close in her circle.

I I won't say who.

This reporter would check in with this friend on the regular and the friend would just kind of give a status update.

And you sort of take one element of the status update and you build a story around it.

Then you say, all right, let's report this out.

So you have a source, but like, let's say the source is like, she's doing really great, but also she was really unhappy like one day.

Do you guys selectively pick the thing that's a story?

Yeah.

The answer is yes.

I mean,

again, it's it's Saturday Night Live, right?

People give them them so much credit because they go live, what, like 15 weeks a year?

We have to put out a magazine 52 weeks of the year.

We don't have dark weeks, right?

We weren't filling it with lies.

Again, we were taking something that a source, quote unquote, close to Aniston would tell us and build a story around it.

I mean, they were pretty naked with just like, you know, she's really upset about Brad.

I mean, it's hard to argue with that.

I mean, she probably is really upset about getting a divorce.

Sure.

We reached out to Jennifer Anniston for this episode and she declined to speak with us because, duh, she's Jennifer Anniston.

Every time she talks about these things, it kicks off a whole other round of speculation and coverage.

So she doesn't do it very often.

And this contributes to her unknowability.

We feel like we know her because we know Rachel Greene so well.

But if you actually think about Anniston's personality, she's hard to describe, hard to pin down.

She's a bit of an enigma, a blank canvas for us to project our own preoccupations on.

And the tabloids, they did just that.

Their sad gen completely permeated the culture.

The closest my fiancé's mother and I have like ever come to having a fight was when she was like saying that like Jennifer Anniston is like sad and desperate.

And I was like, this is not going to end well if we keep talking about this.

That's Sadie Guinness, a senior editor at TV Guide and a big fan of Anniston's.

I remember we were at Yellowstone having just seen the geyser go off and we were having a lovely lunch in the lodge.

And she just started talking about like, ugh, Jennifer Aniston, you know, like eye-rolling about her and like looking down at her.

And I was like, no, no, no, like that is not Jen.

You're just like reading the tabloid covers.

Like she is so much more than that.

As the years went on, as Aniston dated other men, got married, did all of the things that look like moving on, Sad Jen kept selling magazines.

Here's Joe Piazza again, the woman who was running a tabloid newsroom in the early 2010s.

Yeah, I mean, once you realized that Sad Jen is selling,

that story completely takes on a life of its own.

And then Sad Jen stories are what you continue to print.

And there were no shortage of people in Jennifer Aniston's universe willing to say that she was miserable.

I mean, it was probably 50% of the people said she was miserable and 50% said she was happy.

And reporters chose to listen to the 50% that said she was miserable because they knew that those stories would sell better than her being happy.

If Jennifer Anniston Addison is happy, there's no drama.

There's no story.

There's really nothing to be curious about.

And being curious about what famous people are up to, it really does seem, for whatever reason, to be a baseline human preoccupation.

Here's Mara Reinstein.

Okay, honestly, if you had a friend who, me, okay, you can even take me for example, right?

Like, I'm sure people are like, well, why doesn't she have kids?

It's just the society we're in.

Don't you feel like it doesn't matter if you're a celebrity or a regular person.

If a couple has been married for 10 years, you're going to ask them, well, are you thinking about kids?

That's just how it is.

Isn't that shitty?

Yes.

I'm sure

she hates the fact that she can't do an interview about being asked about kids and about asked about her love life.

I don't care how woke our society is.

People are always going to want to know when women are going to have babies.

At this point, Aniston's tabloid persona has almost completely eclipsed both Aniston the actress and Aniston the real person.

Though the real person has occasionally spoken up about what it's like to be portrayed this way.

Here she is in 2016 on the talk show Ellen.

And they love the narrative.

They love the story.

They love that she's jealous and this person's depressed and oh my gosh, never gonna have a

whatever the horrible

little headline is.

We just got to break out of that and go, whoa, whoa.

And women, I have to say, are many of the authors of these horrible

articles that are written in these BS tabloids.

So we have to stop listening to them and we have to stop buying them because it's up to us what makes us happy and fulfilled.

Sad Jen is a deeply retrograde concoction.

In creating her, the tabloids were sending a message to women that was loud and clear.

You need a man and a baby to be happy.

But it needed saying so loudly because it was at odds with what a real woman, what Jennifer Aniston no less, was actually doing in the years after her divorce.

Dating, delaying, or deciding not to have children at all, doing what made her happy and fulfilled.

If celebrities are avatars for our issues, the cultural concerns that are in the air, Sad Jen is not simply some anti-feminist poltergeist.

She's a proxy for all of our complicated, contradictory, and changing feelings about independent women.

She was such a powerful character for so long, not because our ideas about what women ought to do are settled and decided upon, but because they are so

I'm Scott Hansen, host of NFL Red Zone.

Lowe's knows Sundays hit different when you earn them.

We've got you covered with outdoor power equipment from Cobalt and everything you need to weatherproof your deck with Trex decking.

Plus, with lawn care from Scotts, and of course, pit boss grills and accessories, you can get a home field advantage all season long.

So get to Lowe's, get it done, and earn your Sunday.

Lowe's, official partner of the NFL.

So are Jennifer Anderson and Brad Pitt having a baby?

I can definitely say no

and never.

I put this question to Michael Luides, a former celebrity journalist.

He worked at Access Hollywood and with Bonnie Fuller at Us, among other places, who now runs the website Gossip Cop, which is devoted to fact-checking celebrity news.

He's published pieces debunking all of the recent tabloid covers about Pitt and Aniston's relationship.

He does this by calling sources, friends of Aniston's and Pitt's, and asking if there's any truth to the tabloid stories whatsoever.

There never is.

And then he asks their representatives directly, who also deny it.

Is your sense that it has gotten worse?

In the nine years that we've been in business, it has actually gotten far worse.

The general trend is toward less accuracy.

There seems to be less accountability.

And that's saying something, because as is probably clear by now, total unembellished accuracy has never been the tabloid's priority.

Here's Lori Majuski talking about an experience she had back at us in 2005.

You know, I'll never forget there was one, one of the last nights that I was closing a magazine there.

There was a report that there was some celebrity at the Mandarin Hotel cheating on their wife, very high-profile celebrity that I happened to know.

And I went over to the hotel and I saw with my own eyes that the celebrity was sitting with his sister-in-law waiting for his brother to arrive.

And I went back to the office and I said, I know you guys want to run this story, but I just went and saw it with my own eyes.

How would you go over there?

I was like, I had to see it because I just knew, because I knew the person, I knew it couldn't be true.

And I said, we, you know, and then there was this whole, you know, oh, but it could have been a good cover.

And I just knew I had to leave.

Tabloids today seem more brazen than this.

They're making up major life events, engagements and marriages and babies.

Here's Joe Piazza again talking about an experience she had with a higher-up who walked into her office.

We're running a cover story that Jennifer Anderson had a miscarriage.

And we never run anything like that.

You know, it's always like baby woes or something.

Like, but we're never going to say she had a miscarriage because it's not true.

And I was like, no.

Tell your team to like go get quotes about her having a miscarriage.

And I'm like, fuck.

Piazza did not comply with this request.

To lay my very obvious cards on the table, I do not think that Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt are back together and having a baby.

The tabloid I saw at the dentist grabbed my attention because it seemed so patently bogus.

Fan fiction prompted by the fact that for the first time in more than a decade, they're both single again.

Generally speaking, I find tabloids to be really unseemly, but I feel uncomfortable pinning that on any one person, type of person, or entity.

When it comes to tabloids, readers, writers, editors, publishers, celebrities, publicists, marketing departments, they all play their part.

We all play our part.

There's enough ick to go around.

For serious news outlets, every error hurts their reputation.

But no one expects a tabloid to be right all of the time.

In fact, a tabloid only has to be right occasionally for it to give all of its material the very faint whiff of, could this be be true?

Especially if you really, really want the story to be true.

And the tabloids, which except for people, are now all owned by the same company.

American Media, AMI, the creator of Star and the National Enquirer, do still have reporting staffs that break real, truthful celebrity news.

In Touch, for example, broke the story that George and Amal Clooney were having twins.

Did an interview with Stormy Daniels about her affair with the president years before any other media outlet.

AMI, by the way, declined to speak with us for this story.

One reason for these ever more fanciful covers might be because of what's happened to the tabloid business.

Since their heyday in the aughts, tabloid sales have tumbled because of the internet, where you can get all the gossip that you want 24 hours a day.

Tabloids sell in the low hundred thousands on newsstands these days.

But newsstand sales and thus enticing covers are still a big part of their business model.

So they've had to keep amping them up.

Here's Joe Piazza again.

If you look at like the most, most, like all of the headlines on like internet celebrity content and stuff, you're going to get a lot more Kardashian and Cardi B and a lot of royals, frankly, who appeal to millennial consumers of celebrity content.

But the people who are still reading celebrity magazines grew up with Jennifer Anniston.

So they're now in their late 30s, 40s, and even 50s.

And so that's why Jennifer Anniston still works on the cover of those magazines.

A cover about Aniston and Pitt getting back together is the most amped up cover cover possible.

A greatest hits cover, a nostalgia play, a reunion episode of a favorite TV show in which the heroine is finally happy.

What this means, though, is that Jennifer Anniston is probably not the potent tabloid icon she once was, is that the tabloids are more desperate than they once were.

Anniston then has gotten unlucky twice, first by getting so spectacularly divorced as the tabloids were rising, and then to still be a going concern as they fall.

Still, over the last few years, Sad Jen has become more widely accepted as a kind of anti-feminist projection, one that doesn't have much or anything to do with the actual Jennifer Anniston.

Here's Joe Piazza again.

Looking back, and not looking back as a journalist, but just looking back as a woman, I do feel a little bit guilty having thrown these narratives onto Jennifer Anniston for so long.

And also, not guilty because, oh my gosh, poor Sad Jen.

I think Jen's doing fine.

But what I feel guilty about is creating this narrative that in order to be happy, a woman has to have this very specific thing.

So, you know, in order to be happy, Jen had to have the marriage.

In order to be happy, Jen had to have the baby.

And I think that's damaging generally.

And I feel really bad about that.

And I'm incredibly careful to try to correct it in my like pseudo-feminist novels now.

And you could argue that Aniston has gotten some benefit from all her tabloid coverage, even though Aniston herself would surely disagree.

Jennifer Aniston has stayed as relevant as she has, partly due to the fact that the tabloids and the internet celebrity culture has held her up for so long, because we've seen a lot of women in the past 20 years just, you know, people forget about them.

They no longer have a career.

Aniston is a middle-aged actress whose most famous work is almost 15 years behind her.

I don't say that to be obnoxious.

I too love Jennifer Aniston.

I say it to note how rare her continued ubiquity is.

On my walk to the subway every morning, I see her trying to sell me smart water.

She has a Netflix movie coming out and supposed to co-star in a sitcom for Apple with Reese Witherspoon.

The ongoing popularity of friends, her movie career, how much people like her, the fact that she doesn't seem to age, all of this is part of her longevity.

But so are the tabloids, which have kept her in the public eye as a contemporary, sympathetic figure for all of these years.

Jennifer Aniston still has a career in large part because the public is still fascinated by her.

So it is a double-edged sword.

It's a double-edged sword for almost everyone involved in Jennifer Anniston's tabloid saga.

Here's Mara Reinstein again.

Listen, did I go to journalism school to write weekly covers about Jennifer Anniston every week?

No, but I'm proud of having worked at Us Weekly in its heyday

and being a part of that pop culture movement where everyone wanted to see what was on the the cover of Us Weekly every single Wednesday.

It was fun being a part of that.

You can never recapture it.

It's gone.

It's completely gone because of social media.

It killed it.

But I loved it back in the day.

So the thing about my internship at Us Weekly,

I hated it.

Transcribing all of those interviews with deeply inane and minor reality TV contestants, it felt like such thankless busy work.

Sometimes I would be sent out to Times Square to ask 100 people to look at pairs of photos and decide who wore it best.

I found approaching strangers to ask them this so mortifying, I would quit after the first 10, fudge the rest of the results, and then spend time hiding out in the mid-Manhattan library, reading Mary McCarthy essays as a form of personal protest.

Something about the whole thing just seemed so out of whack to me.

So many smart people putting in so much time and energy into something that was, at best, so silly.

My experience changed how I felt about celebrities and tabloids forever.

I never got the kick out of them that I had before.

Visiting the sausage factory made me a vegetarian.

I mean most of the time.

I think a lot of that was snobbery, and the snob in me has watched as the idea that celebrity is a sideshow, a trashy distraction, something that just doesn't matter that much.

Well, she's watched that idea has been disproved in spectacular fashion.

Celebrity, gossip, semi-truths, and fake news have moved from the sidelines to the center, from the tabloids into the White House.

It's not that tabloids and politics are exactly the same now, but they are not quite the worlds apart they once seemed to me to be either.

Nothing about them seems quite so silly.

I think if you're going to make a positive case for the tabloids, beyond just accepting that some version of them will always exist, that we'll always be curious about famous people, that we all need something distracting to read on an airplane, it's that they, and gossip more generally, are a mirror that shows us who we really are, warts and all, what we really care about, what speaks to our lizard brains and hearts.

If that's true, then Jennifer Aniston's tabloid existence doesn't just tell us something about our rigid expectations for women.

It tells us something even more expansive about our relationship with the truth.

Which is that when the truth is as repulsive as a great story, we'll take the truth.

But when the truth gets gnarly or pedantic or plotless or dull, we'll take the story, even if it's no longer true.

And the Jennifer Aniston story, it's not ending anytime soon.

Just as we were finishing up this piece in very late November of 2018, Us Weekly of all places ran a new cover story about Aniston.

Therapy saved my life, it said.

After a devastating year, Star opens up about healing after heartbreak.

In touch, Us's sister publication picked up this story approvingly.

I guess Brad and Jen's honeymoon is over.

This Us cover puts Jen in a happy place, not with Brad, but in a self-empowered, I choose me state of contentment.

It's much more believable.

But one thing really stood out to me in the short promotional video that accompanies this story online, in which an Us employee talks about the magazine scoop.

I don't want to be anywhere other than where I am right now.

The actress is said to be enjoying her life despite the constant speculation that she's desperate to be a mom.

She has said of the pregnancy rumors that no one considers how sensitive that might be for my partner and me.

They don't know what I'm doing.

Years and years after starting it all with a cover that wondered, when will Jennifer Anniston have her baby?

Us Weekly is acting like this kind of speculation came from somewhere else, maybe even somewhere mildly distasteful.

The narrative, it moves on.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

We're taking next month off, but we'll be back in 2019 with brand new shows.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written and reported by Willa Paskin and was edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Thanks to June Thomas, Mark Harris, Jen Dahl, Madeline Price, Frankie Thomas, Ann Helen Peterson, Amy Wolf, Carly Seitzer, Sharon Marcus, Henry Schaefer, Allison Benedict, Ava Lubell, Allison Hughes, and Christopher McDonald.

Thanks for listening, and see you soon.

Yo, this is important, man.

Uh, my favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pacebreakers, the ones with all the pockets.

Well, I just got back from vacation and I think I left them in my hotel room.

And dude, I need to replace these shorts.

I wear them like every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.

Could you send me the link to where you got them?

Thanks, bro.

Talk soon.

Looking for your newest go-to's?

Shop Lululemon's bestsellers now at lululemon.com.